“Like other TV news programs, its producers are obsessed with the vile, the criminal and the foolish things men do, but they censor themselves in their reportage and thereby ‘normalise’ such behaviour,” writes ROBERT MACKLIN in his 350th Gadfly column. 

I turned off the seven o’clock news in disgust during the headlines. Finally, I’d had enough. 

Since I spend my days at the computer, any breaking news arrives via the daily and weekly CityNews supplemented occasionally by the digital New York Times. 

The weekend intake is a different matter – it features the sheer joy of the ABC’s Landline, and especially the New Scientist magazine. They do what the other news outlets singley fail to do – they tell, respectively, the optimistic story of Australian ingenuity, and our exciting human progress.

I will return to their virtues shortly, but that’s not the main reason for my rejection of the traditional ABC television news. The sad truth is that the national broadcaster is caught in a paradox of its own making. 

Like other TV news programs, its producers are obsessed with the vile, the criminal and the foolish things men do, but they censor themselves in their reportage and thereby “normalise” such behaviour. 

This is blindingly obvious in their coverage of the wars that begin every bulletin. 

In Gaza, for example, some 40,000 people, including at least 12,000 children, have been torn to pieces or buried alive by the bombs supplied by America and deployed by Israel. Yet our TV reports only ever show the surrounds of a fuzzed-out “casualty” or a reassembled one in a neat package of white sheets ready for burial.

The anonymous perpetrators are never shown in their aircraft taking aim and releasing the deadly bombs or missiles. They are not even called the Israelis. Instead, it’s the anodyne “IDF” with a neat, uniformed spokesman explaining that the enemy – a “terrorist” so-designated by our own government – was hiding beneath the hospital or school or apartment block they demolished. 

It’s not that I want to revel in the horror pictures of death and destruction. On the contrary, I abhor the entire, execrable activity. But for that very reason, neither do I want war – the ultimate human obscenity – to be airbrushed by the censors. 

The reason is simple. If we were exposed to the reality, the vile mass murder of children in all its bloody horror, we would rise as one and demand it immediately ceases.

However, turn the coin, and in wonderful contrast, the latest Landline features great stories beginning with the explosion of new brussel sprouts varieties grown in South Australia. They are changing our vegetable diet across the country. 

Then comes the revival of the vast native oyster colony in the waters of Eyre Peninsula after its destruction over a century from 1840. That’s followed by the transformation of the lupin flower crop of northern Victoria into a breakfast cereal of such nutritional value (and good taste) that dieticians report great results from Australia’s aged care residents. And finally, a French and Australian couple are joyously raising their two little girls on a 215,000-hectare conservation property on the Queensland edge of the Simpson Desert.

The current New Scientist discovers multitudes of both benign and threatening microbes in the human brain. It carries an Australian peer-reviewed analysis revealing that the Wuhan market of wild animals really did cause the COVID-19 epidemic (so much for Scomo’s racist fantasies and the millions lost in the barley, wine and lobster exports to China). 

But my favourite is the interview with British astrophysicist Jo Dunkley who has not only explored the milli-seconds after the Big Bang, she is also headed to the imminent opening of the Simons Observatory in Chile. And with a little luck, that will lead to a vision of what went before! 

Puts the seven o’clock news in its place, doesn’t it?

robert@robertmacklin.com